Short Stories

Phonecall

Phonecall

Jody's Notes

(January, 2009, March, 2012)

So it’s 1993. My first philosophy book is about to be published, and I think: Hey, I’m secure. I won’t lose my job. Why not write another novel? I’ve written one already—but not quite the way I want to, not totally the way I want to. All dialogue, goddammit! No description: no indication of who’s talking. If you do the voices right, anyone can tell who’s talking without the novel having to be explicit about it. Make the people who are talking comicbook characters. Then it’s even easier to tell who’s talking. (Call the novel, for example, Superman. Because he’s a comicbook character if anyone is.)

I was obsessed with dialogue. (I kind of still am.) I was listening all the time—hearing voices everywhere. (Well, no surprise—everywhere you go people are talking, have you noticed that?) I’d sit at parties, listening and writing stuff down. (That can really freak people out: some guy transcribing stuff onto paper while other—illegal—stuff is being passed around.) And I’m recording conversations, on the phone, with friends at dinner, and then later transcribing those conversations onto paper by hand. With permission, of course. You’d be surprised how fast everyone forgets they’re being recorded. So the conversation goes totally natural after only a few minutes.

Have you noticed? The ordinary dialogue form is totally artificial. Real people talk to each other simultaneously. Their comments to each other overlap. They don’t take turns. They don’t have to. They talk and process at the same time; they respond to questions at the same time they’re processing the questions—at the same time the questions are being asked. I noticed this because when I’d transcribe what I’d recorded, I had to keep running the tape over and over to get exactly what was being said. Two people (or more) speaking at the same time run interference with each other on tape. Makes it hard to hear what anyone has said.

So now I’m being tortured by the artificiality of the ordinary dialogue form. One person’s words in quotes, new line, then another person’s words in quotes. That’s not what it’s like. Or like in some of Shaw’s plays, putting each voice in its own column with the statement: said simultaneously. That’s artificial too.

I wanted real. After all, dialogue is a whole lot more subtle than it can be depicted as being in these literary forms. There are patterns to how people interrupt each other. Some interruptions are aggressive; others aren’t. People can clash just in how they overlap. Or they can be harmonious about it. I wanted to be able to show all of this on paper.

And then it hits me. I remember where I was. Sitting up in bed thinking about this. When I should have been sleeping. Or sleeping with someone. Music. You have each instrument with its own line next to the lines of the other instruments, and you can see at a glance when they overlap and when they don’t. Do the same thing with dialogue.

So I invented a new literary form. (How often does that happen?) I dedicated an entire chapter of Superman to that form. Call it synchronous prose. Some people were into it. Christopher Sorrentino really like it. Jonathan Lethem really liked the novel; but I can’t remember if he particularly singled out that chapter. I think he didn’t. Some people complained: I have to keep moving my eyes up and down—it’s really annoying. Other people said: It’s really swift and natural—ordinary dialogue just looks fake after reading this.

And it does. It makes the ordinary dialogue form look really fake. I was hooked on synchronous prose for years. Jonathan Lethem had connected me to a literary agent. (Jonathan is such a nice generous guy: he really pushed my work on other people for a couple of years there.) The literary agent was interested but uncomfortable representing the novel I’d already written. It was way too experimental. Write another one, she suggested. I am, I told her, I’m working on it right now. It’s a detective novel. Good, good, she said. I told her some of the plot. Good, good, she said. And then I told her how I was writing it. The entire thing. In synchronous prose. Please don’t do that, she told me. And she was sincere. I could hear the sadness in her voice.

I understood. I sympathized. But I was addicted. The mid-nineties were a good period for me in terms of meeting people. I met a lot of writers. In Brooklyn. At parties. At cafes. In bars. For real. And I met agents and even publishers. But none of this was going to help me if all I could write was synchronous prose. And that was all I could write. For years. I wrote the detective novel that I had intended to write entirely in synchronous prose. I called it “Ambivalent Carnivores.” It’s still called “Ambivalent Carnivores,” by the way. Jonathan Lethem read it. Um, I don’t think so, he told me. That other novel you wrote, he told me, that’s a great novel. Try to get that published. Do more of that. (This was in 1996.)

But I can’t do anything twice. It’s a real problem for me. Maybe it’s my episodic memory that doesn’t work so well (so I can’t remember what I’ve already done). Maybe it’s something deep in me that rebels because it thinks it’s being punished if it has to do something twice. (Writing things repeatedly was a punishment when I was in grammar school. Something in me refuses to forget that.)

In 1997 I finally awoke from synchronous prose like from a nightmare. Or from a stroke. Or from a binge. Or from Buddhism. Something. I took up ordinary prose forms tentatively—trying to talk again, and then write. “Hello,” I’d say to people. And then I’d pause meaningfully. Wait my turn. Quietly.

In 2001, I excerpted the beginning of “Ambivalent Carnivores,” and rewrote it slightly so that it would work self-containedly as a short story. Wisconsin Review liked it, and published it in 2002. Sometimes I think about writing more synchronous prose. Maybe a short story. And then the fear comes over me. I start to hear voices again. All at once.

The characters in the story are talking on landlines. Which don’t really exist anymore. But maybe that’s not crucial. They’re also talking about white pages and phone books. Are there still white pages and phone books? Outside of museums, I mean? I think we need a new kind of museum. Not for art—because who needs a museum for art anymore? We need museums for extinct things. Landline phones, for example. Or vacuum tubes. (Have you ever seen a vacuum tube? I think I have once.) And televisions. The old ones, I mean. Television stations too. (Soon, very soon.) And for people too, let’s admit it. People like me, for example. So that whatever’s going to be around soon can all go to the museum together. Maybe whatever’s still around will still have families, maybe whatever’s still around will still use the word “Mommy,” as in “Mommy? what’s that?” And the Mommy (whatever “Mommies” actually are soon) can say: “That’s a Jody.” And the kind of child that’s still around will be really puzzled (this is what I predict), “What’s a Jody?” that child’s going to ask. (Okay, I know you think I’m exaggerating, you really do. But just you wait.)

—Hello? speaking. I’m in I’m a little in a rush actually I’ve got

— Yes am I speaking with J. Hillman? And how are we this afternoon? I’m Peter Cacheon